Andrew Wakefield's Study Linking Autism to Vaccines Officially Retracted by Journal
By Barbara Lock, MDFebruary 02, 2010
The autism study is infamous in medical circles. The pediatricians utter the words "The Wakefield study" as if the name itself were a cuss word. When they are approached by colleagues with questions about autism and vaccines, they all say, 'Have you even read that study? It was terrible.'
Andrew Wakefield is the lead author on the first and most important research study linking autism to vaccination. While Wakefield himself retracted his article in 2004, the medical journal the Lancet has taken the additional step of publishing a further retraction this week as new information about how the study was performed has come to light.
The General Medical Council, a body that governs physicians in Great Britain, has found Dr. Wakefield's study to be invalid because of a "dishonest and irresonsible" selection bias in patient enrollment.
Selection bias is an important way that a study can produce results that do not represent the truth. Researchers who have not designed the study carefully can promote selection bias unintentionally. Selection bias is sometimes called sampling bias.
Here's how it works: a reseacher thinks he is studying a representative sample of patients with a particular disease or exposure, but because of bias in the way patients are identified, recruited, consented, or allocated into treatment groups (if applicable), he may actually be getting a sample of the sickest patients with disease X, or the ones who have telephone numbers, or the ones who drive, or the ones who use the internet, or the ones who speak English, or the ones who were referred from personal injury lawyers. Having a sample population that is not a good representation of the entire target population will move your results away from the truth, by showing that a treatment works better or worse than it really does, or that an exposure is more or less likely to cause disease than it really does.
Dr. Wakefield has issued a statement through a representative: "The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust and I invite anyone to examine the contents of these proceedings and come to their own conclusion. In fact, the Lancet paper does not claim to confirm a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Research into that possible connection is still going on."
It is my guess that the selection bias that plagued Dr. Wakefield's work was unlikely to have been intentional deceipt, but rather was more likely to be the result of sloppy design in the flush of excitement of apparent discovery.
It is MedPie.com's position and strong belief that the evidence linking autism to vaccinations to date is either incomplete or faulty, that there is good evidence refuting a causative link between autism and vaccinations, and that the vast majority of children will benefit from vaccinations more than they are harmed.
But we also know that the study that would answer this question definitively, a large scale randomized controlled trial of MMR compared to sham vaccination looking for outcomes of autism, measels, mumps, rubella, hospitalization, death and cost, doesn't exit yet. This type of study may never exist; it would be very difficult to get approved by an IRB (ethical review board) since vaccinations are already the standard of care.
Editor's Note: Yes, our children are vaccinated.
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